Skin colour need not matter when you’re playing a mythical Norseman.

IF you have seen the blockbuster movie Thor in the cinemas lately, you may remember Heimdall. He is a relatively minor character, but his being in the film caused an uproar when it was first announced.

Why? For the simple reason that Idris Elba, the actor who played him, is black.

This would be like having an African play Hang Tuah. We all know that we need at least somebody of mixed British-Malay parentage to do justice to that role. But an African?

The main argument of those who protested is that as Thor and the characters in the film were mythological Norse gods, they should all look like Vikings or Norsemen.

Idris Elba is convincing in Thor.

This was all perplexing to Elba, who points to the fact that the foundation of the whole story is pure fantasy.

“Thor has a hammer that flies to him when he clicks his fingers,” he was quoted as saying in an interview. “That’s okay, but the colour of my skin is wrong?”

In comparison, race relations in Malaysia is a very touchy subject, and the colour of your skin might matter. It is possibly the most polarising topic in Malaysian politics today.

Recently there has been a call to remove the “ethnicity” or “race” category from official forms. The argument goes that your race should not matter when you’re taking out a bank loan or applying for a job.

And yet, that is clearly not true when you’re talking to advertising agencies and marketing groups. These people have done their surveys and have concluded that the different races have significantly different tastes. Most importantly, the different races prefer to watch shows in their own mother tongue.

So race is the strongest indicator of which television channel you will watch – it’s how they are decided in the first place.

And for the people who sell you satellite TV dishes and surveys on what you watch, race is a very important box to have on the form indeed.

There are many correlations between race and other indicators in Malaysia; income level and education are just two that come to mind. This was the raison d’être for policies such as the New Economic Policy (NEP), which took the stand that if those of one race seem to be in trouble, then we should help them.

In fact, affirmative action programmes have been implemented around the world. Even the United Nations’ International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination agrees that programmes and initiatives may be needed to “ensure the adequate development and protection of certain racial groups or individuals belonging to them”.

In short, it seems “racist” policies are okay if you are using them to fix racist problems.

But what does racism mean in a world where ethnic lines are being blurred?

Last weekend I went to the wedding of a Chinese friend and a girl of mixed Malay/Portuguese parentage. If they have a child, he would be a bumiputra Malay.

The night before that, I had dinner with a couple; the husband is from Canada and the wife is Hakka Chinese. Their children will be classified as “others”.

By having only two choices of ethnicity for the offspring of mixed-race marriages, and given the probability that one of these children will marry outside his/her race at some point, the consequence is that, one day, everybody in Malaysia will be classified under one of only two races.

One thing this simplistic example shows is that the definition of race itself is prone to subjectivity. Why are we so hung up about race when we might very well disagree which race we are in the first place?

Even if we take out the race field completely, we usually know by just looking at a name which ethnic group the person falls under.

And if we are saying that race doesn’t matter, and the statistics then show there is a preference one way or another, then it should be taken as a warning signal that it does matter, and something is wrong.

A friend was once on a committee that gave out grants. During a review of the award process, somebody asked him how many bumiputra companies got the grants. Very few, he answered, about 20%.

The reviewer then said this was not an acceptable state, given that slightly over half the Malaysian population are bumiputra, so they should try to make sure that half the awardees were bumiputra. My friend retorted that only 20% of those who applied were bumiputra in the first place!

That is in fact the biggest danger you can make when you analyse data. Take another example: If I told you that only 1.5% of CEO positions in the United States are held by women, you may be tempted to think that there is a very unfair glass ceiling that stops women from getting promoted.

But economists from the University of Chicago studied what women did after they graduated, and came up with interesting results.

They found out that female MBAs in the United States with children worked 24% fewer hours than those without children. Unsurprisingly, their careers suffered for it, but their failure to reach the upper echelons could be attributed to a result of choice rather than discrimination.

So we come back to director Kenneth Branagh’s decision to cast a black Englishman as a Norse god. According to him, the choice was easy because Idris Elba is a fantastic actor.

Having watched Thor, I think Elba does the role justice, and the colour of his skin doesn’t make a jot of difference as to whether the movie as a whole is good or not – unless you are one of those who wanted it to matter in the first place.

Yes, race can matter if you look for the reasons. But, in the end, it is the results that should count.

Logic is the antithesis of emotion but mathematician-turned-scriptwriter Dzof Azmi’s theory is that people need both to make of life’s vagaries and contradictions.

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